Punishment
by Demoira
Summary: BtVS, Willow POVish, picks up directly after Grave. Willow is on the edge of madness, and has to come to terms.


Title: _Punishment_

Rating: PG (If you can watch the show, you can read this.)

Summary: BtVS, Willow POVish, picks up directly after _Grave._

Disclaimer: Not mine.  _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ and all characters are property of Mutant Enemy and the devious mind of Joss Whedon.

Author's note: Quotes from (respectively): Xander to Willow in BtVS Episode 622 _Grave_, Bible Acts 28:4, _Angel_ by Jimi Hendrix, Giles to Willow in BtVS Episode 603 _Flooded_, Bible Isaiah 63:4, _Wiccan Rede._

Punishment 

_I love you._

The confusion set in.  Suddenly, she wasn't quite sure where she had gone so wrong, what she had done, that would lead her to this end.  This non-end that she cringed to acknowledge as her life.

Being held made it a little easier.  She closed the world out and pretended the arms holding her were softer, rounder, perfect.  She didn't dare open her eyes and see what she had done, what she hadn't done.

For now, breathing and hearing another's pulse under her ear would have to do.

_Justice has not allowed him to live._

There was hot tea in the mug between her hands.  She had to keep reminding herself that it was hot and that it would burn her if she loosened her fingers and let it slip.

She stared as each individual finger slowly turned from pale bloodless orange to bright pink and then vivid red around the edges.  The blood was rushing to each member to heal the damage the heat was doing.

Scientifically, she could recognize what was happening, but still, she didn't register the sensation of being burned.  It was simply red blood flowing.

Red blood ... and visions of flesh tearing from muscles and sinews, raw bones and tendons revealed.

She blinked hard, squeezing her eyes to remove the offending memory.  She had done what had to be done.  Now she needed to learn to forget it all.  She knew that she couldn't live with it.  Not this person that was Willow.  She would have to be that other person to live with what she did.  So she had to forget or change.  And she couldn't let herself change.

Justice had been served.

Now it was time to forget.

Her love could not love the person she would have to become if she learned to live with the consequences of her actions.

To be Tara's girl, she had to claw the etchings of blood, the taste of vengeance in her mouth, the terror in his eyes, the thrill of power tingling in her hands and groin, from the places it hid in her mind, and forget.

_Fly on my sweet angel.  Tomorrow I will be right by your side._

Nothing seemed to be making any sense.

Tara's funeral was not a thing she had been created to live through.  Black coffin and bright yellow flowers everywhere.  It had been death and life twisted cruelly around each other and her throat, choking her.  The looks on the faces of people who had no idea what truly had been lost spun her stomache and har eyes blurred.

The bile burned the back of her throat.  The brightest light in the world had been quenched by a petty man with aspirations of world domination.

It should have been a cartoon instead of a reality.

Only, in a cartoon, she would have been there to see him pay for what he had done.  Maybe the cartoonist would have even given her the pleasure of seeing it over and over again.  Then he would have brought Tara back.  A cartoon miracle.

In cartoons, death is never permanent.

She remembered that bloody handprint, streaked across the screen playing cartoons, from the first massacre she ever saw.  The death had appalled her then.  But now, she would sell the world to see Warren's body, sucked dry by a vampire.

She didn't understand why Xander looked at her oddly as she vented her rage at the fact that Warren had had such a simply death, run over by a bus in a freak accident.

She wailed at the injustice, and Xander quietly led her away from the graveside.

You were the one I trusted most to respect the forces of nature. 

She stood on the threshold of their old room, unable to move.  She was a puppet held upright through no will of her own, and she wasn't sure she could force one foot in front of the other without a little help from the puppetteer.

Lacking a guiding push, she searched inside the reservoir of power and energy that swam in her center, looking for something that could give her the momentum necessary to enter the room she had shared with her love for nine months.

What she found waiting in her reservoir was nothing she was prepared for.

_Standing in the room, watching the surprised look on Tara's face as the bullet penetrated her heart._

_The soul-destroying pain of losing her forever._

_The rage at the universe that would take Tara away._

_Seeking out power and Warren._

And, oh, the glory of Warren bound and at her mercy.  The terror in his eyes as his lips pulled at the twine which stitched them closed.  Each tiny sound magnified by her powers as his flesh was yanked away from muscles, his nerves seared and his heart seized by the agony.

Divine pleasure from the buried memory of her vengeance took over her where she stood.

There was a surge and a thrust, and then she was blind, the remnants of the bright green flash taking over her vision.

When her eyes cleared, she blinked, and then she closed them.  What had happened couldn't possibly have happened.

Their bed was destroyed, and with it the armoire, and everything else in the room.

This was her, her life, their life, their love, and it was nothing but torn pieces now.

And the torn pieces were nothing.

She stood looking about in regret.  She hadn't meant to do this.  The monster that hid inside her, that she knew had done all the things she couldn't live with having done, had taken over her and done this.

All the piece of who she thought she was were strewn across the floor.

Beige chiffon top, shredded and mixed with pieces of jeans, wooden heel of a pair of boots, glass chips and slivers of wood from the shattered bed.  The pattern was repeated throughout the room,

Barefoot, she stumbled across the room, oblivious to glass shards slivering into her feet, to kneel in front of what had been her mirror.  There, the only thing untouched by her outburst: a picture of her beloved, smiling at her through the lens.

The sob slipped on her lips, and she had to clamp them closed to prevent more cries of anguish.  The loss cut through her body, slicing the energy out of her limbs, making her impossibly limp.

There was a universal balance somewhere that she knew was off.  It was inside of her and all around her.  But she couldn't focus long enough to fix it.  She couldn't even find it.  The agony skittered through her soul.

Her body slowly gave out, and she curled up, the picture delicately molded to her lips.

For the day of vengeance was in my heart, and the year of my redemption has come.

There was something comforting in the blank whiteness of the hospital walls.  She decided that as long as she could look at them and keep herself from seeing the morbid splatter of red flashing against the plaster, she was okay.  She was going to be okay.

Of course.

This story was written in a certain way, she had come to realize.

Slowly, she was expected to heal.  She would be a hero again.  Only, she would revert to being the hero-that-wasn't that she was before Tara.

She knew now, where she had gone wrong.

She had given life where it did not belong.  The universe had restored the balance by taking life from where it belonged.  The universe didn't even care about the final result.  That it was her punishment was chance and fate.  She knew that now, just as she knew that she had to give up being the person Tara loved, as she had to give up Tara.

Punishment.

The doctors would nod whenever they came in, sure that there was no hope for her.

They didn't realize what she had realized: that this story had already been written, and she didn't have a choice.  She had been chosen, that day so long ago when Buffy saved her, to become some tragic heroine, destroyed by what she destroyed

The doctors had nothing to do with her healing.  That was part of the tale.  She would heal, but never be whole.

The two ends of who she had been and was would slowly mesh, and she was learning not to push against the tender threads that bound the two together.

She could never again forget.

Punishment.

_An ye harm none, do what ye will._

The only question she didn't know the answer to, was branded to her heart.

Just as she knew where this was heading, she knew her question would remain forever unanswered.

_Do you still love me?_


End file.
